Tamerlane

I demand that I not be able to remember anything about this game when I am done with it.

Attaching physical appearance to stats gets very Fable-y very fast. ... That's bad.

Just remember that talking weapons tend to get very bored when left in sacred shrines for too many years.

Seems Sawyer's basic philosophy is, "If we give you an option to take, we should give you content that supports that option". If you can take "Shillelagh Specialist" as a feat, you can bet you're going to run in to some sweet-ass mother****ing shillelaghs over the course of the game. Not everything has to be equal, and different combinations will by necessity be better than others, but taken on their own, everything should be useful. EDIT: Calice. I am a horrible person who did not read past the first page and also did not read post dates.

Don't relate these mechanisms to realism too much, they are meant to give the gameplay some flavor, not simulate absolute realism. It was just a demonstrative example. Hey, that's totally fair. But if you're going to talk about "hey, it happens in real life", so is my response. Critical misses can be a goofy fun thing (10 Luck and Jinxed LET'S GO!) or a way to add some "realistic chaos" to otherwise boring crit:hit:miss rolls, but I'm guessing that the former doesn't really fit the tone of the game and the latter... well, honestly, that usually just turns in to the goofy fun thing anyway. If they can do it well, then hey, more power to 'em. I wouldn't be sad to see 'em go, though. Hrmph. Y'all would have a lot fewer accidents if you didn't spell the word "axe" like a bunch of heathen savages. Well... Personally, I'd like to see a range of miss-minor stamina damage-minor stamina and health damage-regular damage-critical hit. But... eh. I'll live with whatever.

Think about chopping firewood, and accidentally missing a swing and hitting your leg with the axe (not an uncommon occurence, and a pretty serious one too). Obviously some sense should be held onto when simulating accidents, but it's not really impossible for one to harm himself due to a clumsy attempt at whatever. Not... not really? I mean, as far as accidents go, yeah, it happens. But of the tens of thousands of times (bull**** estimate) I've swung an axe at a block of wood, I have had zero accidents. If I "critically missed" a block of wood as often as some of the RPG characters I've played, I would have had no legs before I left elementary school. Of course, logs don't fight back, which is a contributing factor to the whole "critical miss" thing. Even then, their rate of occurrence in games in which they're implemented is... kinda silly. And even if they do have a good rate of occurrence and good effects and all that... well, like I said, I really prefer them in turn-based games where I can properly appreciate them occurring.

Critical misses have their place, but I much prefer they stay in turn-based games. Sigh, I hate to do this, but.... It's rogues, not rouges. Rogues are devious people; rouges are powders that eighteenth century french prostitutes used to put on their cheeks. Fighters wear full-plate; they know where to shove the pointy thing. Also, can I suggest using a recent version of Firefox so you've at least got a spell checker available? I get the feeling he's not a natural English speaker. Not too huge an issue so long as he's trying and you can more-or-less work it out. A spell checker won't help with things like "rouge" and "where" and the Firefox spell checker says that "mages" isn't a word, anyway. I'm not Josh Sawyer, but I'll do my best to interpret and respond to these and not totally misrepresent what I have read and heard although I'll probably fail at some point. 1. All other things being equal, a heavily armoured character will always have greater survivability, though this can be minimized through crushing weapons. A lightly armoured character will be able to do things faster. 2. Unsure what they're doing as far as shields, blocking, and parrying. Armour does reduce damage, and presumably there will be spells that do this as well ("arcane veil" has been mentioned). 3. At present, there is a minimum damage, similar to Fallout: New Vegas. 4. Rogues will have some skills for survivability. Examples were given in update 36. 5. Unknown. They have also not talked about spells missing, to my knowledge. 6. Same as question 2, I think.

Urgh. I really hated the finishing animations in DAO and Skyrim. Like, it was cool the very first time I did it to the ogre, but every single instance afterwards was just a test of patience. Also, I impaled a dragon on my ****ing hammer. What the hell, man?

Only if it plays the eighth song from here while you do it.

"Weapon glows if near enemy type" is cool and all, but it feels extraordinarily derivative given its use in the most famous piece of fantasy literature ever.

I think everyone's shocked into angry silence by the fact that someone tried to use the word "malus" in a sentence and also wasn't a Diablo 2 character.

Christ, how the hell did you people start this "strong women in gaming" and, "well, I don't want to sound sexist, but biologically speaking..." bull**** anyway?

We made fun of it very briefly.

I'd rather they keep the "deep stash" abstract...

As far as the "Well, why use piercing weapons?" conversation goes, remember that some characters might not have the option to switch between slashing and crushing. And archer can use a broadhead arrow against an unarmoured target and a bodkin against a more durable enemy, but there aren't any "extra heavy blunt arrows" for crushing damage.

You have no idea how much I love what you said about inventories, Mr. Sawyer. That's pretty much exactly what I wanted to hear. EDIT: And also everything else is good but especially the inventory stuff.

As far as I know, most people are skeptical as to their ability to actually break a weapon effectively and figure they were just for trying up and disarming.

Mother****, people were discussing bear behaviour? And nobody told me? This is one of those irrelevant things that bugs me in so many video games, so forgive me as I sperg out a bit on the topic. First off, let me just say that most bears hate being around humans. There are exceptions, and they can be acclimatized to humans (see: that youtube video with the waving bear), and I'll confess that I don't know **** about polar or panda bears, but those don't ever really come up in videogames. Black bears (which may or may not actually be black) are relatively small, relatively numerous, and by far the most likely to be aggressive. Brown bears (which may or may not be brown, again, it's just a name), which includes grizzlies, are quite rare, hold very large territory, and are far less likely to aggressively attack a human. Bears are also particularly afraid of noise and large groups, so a party of six people clanking through the woods would be enough to scare off most any black or brown bear, especially once they start throwing fire and lightning around. They may make a night-time visit and try and raid your camp, though. Now, as for what happens when a human-bear encounter does go bad? Well, there are two basic types of bear attacks: aggressive and defencive. Aggressive attacks are usually preceded by stalking behaviour: the bear walks closer to you while you walk and stops when you stop. Actually breaking out and trying to run from it is a terrible idea, as that will trigger a charge, and bears are faster than you over any terrain. The good news about an aggressive attack is that the bear is probably a half-starved yearling black bear, so fighting it is actually a feasible thing for a physically fit adult human with a weapon. Bears don't like going after humans for food because they recognize us as dangerous and if you hurt a hungry black bear enough it will probably run away. A hungry brown bear attacking a human is very rare but unless the human has a rifle is all but guaranteed to end in favour of the bear. But again, party of six, magic, full plate and packing steel, etc. Defencive attacks are a bit more nuanced. They generally occur either because you've surprised the bear, you got too close to its food, or you got too close to its cubs. The good news is that if you notice it before you get to close, you can usually defuse the situation and everyone goes on their way just fine. The bad news here is that if you do end up in a fight, the bear probably isn't going to retreat until you're dead (There are exceptions: a friend of mine survived a charge from a mother brown bear because the fight was protracted enough for the cubs to get the **** out of there and the mother eventually followed after them. He said the most painful part of the whole thing was accidentally pepperspraying himself after it was all over.), which is where the "play dead" tactic comes in to play. Even in the case of a defencive bear, you don't want to run away, because that will still trigger a charge. Bears also sometimes make "bluff charges", where they will run straight at you and veer off a the last moment. They're trying to scare you, and again, the last thing you want to do is run. Climbing a tree is sometimes viable, but most bears can also climb trees, and those that can't can sometimes knock the god damn tree down. My boss loves to tell a story about a guy who used to work for him who climbed a tree to get away from an angry grizzly... only to realize that the bear's cubs were at the top of another tree right beside him. Good times. In conclusion, bears.

There was already a book that did that, though.

Very simple. It's not "having fun playing in your own way." It's playing in a way that's not fun only because the game system rewards you for playing that way. That's the problem with all degenerate mechanics, whether we're talking savegame abuse, grinding, farming, or whatever. A well-designed game should not reward such gameplay. An exploitable level scaling mechanic that makes the game easier by avoiding becoming more powerful is a variant of this. It rewards degenerate gaming. Therefore it should be avoided. It would be doubly Not Fun in a game like P:E where you get all or most of your experience by completing things rather than killing things, since it would reward people for avoiding content. All it would do is make speed runs easier. This would be Not Fun, because in order to be Fun, a speed run has to be a special challenge, not the easiest way to play a game. But....you don't have to play that way if you don't like it. No one wants the game to be super easy, except the people who will play it on super easy mode. For the rest of us there will be a lot of difficulty options it seems. Anyways... I think I know where your coming from. I'm a bit disappointed to see the story will have level scaling, I always enjoyed not being able to kill a certain boss without going out of my way to explore and gain more experience first. The Butcher comes to mind, he would utterly destroy you, and that was truly awesome. But I can see why they would do it so other players who don't like things that hard can just focus on the story. Hopefully we can turn off level scaling for the story and get some truly terrifying enemies. Unenjoyable and Skinner box-esque mechanics can act like angler fish for a lot of players. And yeah, they've said that level scaling is mostly just for the main quest.

You'd still have fog of war in that case, just not the black **** that I don't think there's a common name for. I could definitely get behind that, though; as others have pointed out, if everything was covered in black and you had to get near it to reveal, there would be big chunks of the revealed screenshot that you would probably never see/would look terrible. Also, I'd love it if ranged attacks were more than just hit/miss. Something more like Fallout, or the old Xcom games: if you miss your target, your projectile keeps going and maybe it hits someone standing behind them.

Yeah, I'm not sure what to make of a possible KotOR 3. I figure it'd be best if they either ignore the **** out of the novels and The Old Republic, which probably wouldn't win them any points with anyone, or give it a setting and a story where none of that **** really matters.

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Wait, Skyrim is our go-to example of bad scaling in an Elder Scrolls?

The IE games kinda-sorta did this. 1 selected the party leader, 2 selected the next person in line, etc. 7 selected the first and second person, 8 selected the next two, and so on. = always selected everyone. Not the same thing as ctrl+1 on eleven mutas and an overlord, but still. Don't most laptop trackpads have something to simulate a mouse wheel? Like a two-finger swipe or running your finger down the very edge of the pad or something?